Canada's urban competitiveness agenda : Completing the transition from a resource to a knowledge economy

Canada is one of the very few nations in the world that has the capacity to combine these two models, us- ing resources to fuel the growth of the knowl- edge economy, while deepening and expand- ing the resource economy with technology and knowledge. [...] The best way to measure this is to look at the occupations workers are employed in.12 To get at this, we map the way Canada’s city-regions stack up across the three main occupational classes: the creative class of knowl- edge-based professionals, the shrinking blue-collar working class, and the largest and fastest growing group, the service class, comprised of lower-wage workers in routine service [...] Exhibit 5 charts the geography of the service The Service Class class across Canada’s city-regions, and Exhibit The service class is the largest and most rapidly 6 lists the top and bottom 10 service class loca- growing class. [...] To get at this, we introduce the Canadian Tolerance Index comprised of measures of openness or tolerance: the foreign-born share of the population; the concentration of gay and lesbian people; and the bo- hemian index, which measures the concentration of artists, musicians, and cultural creatives, another indicator of openness. [...] It is time to abandon the narrative that future prosperity lies in the wide open and naturally abundant frontiers of the West and understand that the key to the nation’s future economic well-being lies in the human-built resource of its cities.